Albert Camus Quotes

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep”
― Albert Camus

“Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”
― Albert Camus

“I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.”
― Albert Camus

“To create is to live twice.”
― Albert Camus

“My soul’s a burden to me, I’ve had enough of it. I’m eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don’t belong here.”
― Albert Camus

“We don't have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.”
― Albert Camus

“How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“I've been thinking it over for years. While we
loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't
love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only
I couldn't." - Grant”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.”
― Albert Camus

“And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Despite men's suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of men isolated with their fate.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“To will is to stir up paradoxes”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“I was at ease in everything, to be sure, but at the same time satisfied with nothing. Each joy made me desire another. I went from festivity to festivity. On occasion I danced for nights on end, ever madder about people and life. At times, late on those nights when the dancing, the slight intoxication, my wild enthusiasm, everyone’s violent unrestraint would fill me with a tired and overwhelmed rapture, it would seem to me—at the breaking point of fatigue and for a second’s flash—that at last I understood the secret; I would rush forth anew. I ran on like that, always heaped with favors, never satiated, without knowing where to stop, until the day -- until the evening rather when the music stopped and the lights went out.”
― The Fall

“Ah ! cher ami, que les hommes sont pauvres en invention. Ils croient toujours qu'on se suicide pour une raison. Mais on peut très bien se suicider pour deux raisons. Non, ça ne leur entre pas dans la tête. Alors, à quoi bon mourir volontairement, se sacrifier à l'idée qu'on veut donner de soi ? Vous mort, ils en profiteront pour donner à votre geste des motifs idiots, ou vulgaires. Les martyrs, cher ami, doivent choisir d'être oubliés, raillés ou utilisés. Quant à être compris, jamais.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“The futility of what was happening here seemed to take me by the throat, I felt like vomiting, and I had only one idea: to get it over, to go back to my cell, and sleep... and sleep.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The people are under arms tonight because they hope for justice for tomorrow, Some go about saying that it is not worthwhile…But this is because they vaguely sense that this insurrection threatens many things thar would continue to stand if all took place otherwise.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“My reflection seemed to remain serious even though I was trying to smile at it. I moved the plate around in front of me. I smiled and it still had the same sad, stern expression.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“But perhaps someday, when we are ready to die of exhaustion and ignorance, I shall be able to disown our garish tombs and go and stretch out in the valley, under the same light, and learn for the last time what I know.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays

“In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“All things now arrive in sequence, always one after the other, like evidence arranged against me. I wake, endure, but only because my eyes open. I've talked to myself, and we've made up my mind: we no longer long for tomorrow; today is enough. Survival has begun to impersonate living, yet it alone is not enough to convince what's inside my head to persuade me into believing I belong anywhere. What should be ordinary is nothing else but negotiated for a price I cannot purchase. So I starve most of the time. Hunger is routine; three days a week would pass in absence, a fourth demands and protests. My thoughts remain organized, which is what troubles me most: I cannot tell whether this is existence or merely maintenance, because I'm sure it isn't living—proof, perhaps, that I shouldn't be alive. I know for a fact that the world no longer expects me in it, and I answer in kind because I refused it first. But I am still here, unsure how to undo it—not even inside my life, but confined to a continuation of its own removal proceedings.”
― Samuel Martínez Roque

“Tekerlekler üzerinde kayan zindanımın karanlığında, yorgunluğumun ta derinliklerinden gelişmişçesine, sevdiğim bir kentin, kendimi mutlu hissettiğim belli bir saatin bütün bu alışılmış gürültülerini eskisi gibi, bir bir bulur gibi oldum. Gerginliğini yitiren havada, gazete satıcılarının sesi, küçük parktaki son kuşların ötüşü, sandviç satıcılarının bağrışması, kentin yüksek dönemeçlerinde tramvayların çıkardığı iniltili gıcırtılar ve göğün daha gece limanın üzerine çökmeden önceki uğultusu, bütün bunlar benim için cezaevine düşmeden önce bildiğim gözü kapalı bir gezintiyi düzenliyordu. Evet, bu saat, bundan çok zaman önceleri, kendimi mutlu hissettiğim bir saatti. Beni o zamanlar bekleyen hep hafif ve deliksiz bir uykuydu. Ama yine de bir şeyler değişmişti. Yarını gözlerken kendimi yeniden hücremde buluverdim. Yaz göklerinde uzanıp giden o bildik yollar insanı günahsız uykulara da zindanlara da götürebiliyormuş demek. ”
― Albert Camus

“I have not been able to disown the light into which I was born and yet I have not wanted to reject the servitudes of this time.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays

“It's a bitch, isn't it? It doesn't leave you alone. You see it everywhere. It haunts you; it follows. It doesn't stay out of your dreams, so you have to teach yourself how to pass away with your eyes open because even sleep won't take it from you. Then you think, because its pace is slow, you have a chance of running, and you run. But when you turn around to see, you realize it doesn’t need to chase you because it is already there, waiting at the next place before you even arrive. And you don't know it will be brief the illusion of relief, so thin and fragile, and so quiet. Then it breaks out—not loudly, but inevitably—in between the pauses of your thoughts where you hoped there would be nothing, so you have to keep on thinking so it doesn't show up, uninvited but expected. A memory shaped less like an image and more like a knowing, like understanding: if you run, it'll come along, but if you pause, you'll understand there's no escape because you cannot relocate the thought within the space inside your head. Oh shit, you cannot run away from it because it's been yourself. Don't you see? It's you who always follows. You wait for it as if you knew you'd come along because you always do. Then you have to sit with it, hear it talk about the shit you've said and done, and then you'll get to understand why you're alone; and either bring yourself to run again, to be the one who always follows, or walk beside yourself and come along, befriend the pain, and hold its hand, not letting go through every hollow.”
― Samuel Martínez Roque

“In reality the end of history cannot have, within the limits of our condition, any definable significance. It can only be the object of a faith and of a new mystification. A mystification that today is no less great than the one that of old based colonial oppression on the necessity of saving the souls of infidels.”
― Albert Camus

“In the difficult hour we are living, what else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point? In everything I have done or said up to now, I seem to recognize these two forces, even when they work at cross-purposes.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays

“Occasionally, at the moment of the first star in the still bright sky, under a shower of shimmering light, I thought I knew. I did know, in truth. I still know, perhaps. But no one wants any of this secret; I don’t want any myself, doubtless; and I cannot stand apart from my people.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays

“The man who has such a desire does exist in me. Except that he has something better to do in trying to instill life into the creatures of his imagination.”
― Albert Camus